He was saying at Christmas that he wasn't expecting it to be recommissioned for another series. Good to see that the BBC are committing to some stuff with a bit more edge to it as well as the usual diet of sitcoms and suchlike.

his stand up is pretty divisive in itself as well. A lot of the techniques he uses are pretty unusual and can alienate people pretty easily, particularly now he's in his early 40s.

What came over as a confident brash student 20 years ago can sometimes look like it's a sneering jealous fat bloke now - the style's the same, but the context is a little different. Similarly, the pacing, pauses, repetition, way he plays with/deconstructs language and tells a story throughout his entire set simply doesn't work for some people - or in a 30 minute (rather than 70 minute) set since there's not time for it.

The jokes usually impact through being either totally brutal or needing a bit of nous to work out. Sometimes the line had to be drawn before it went 'overboard' and sometimes the subtleties of the humour were lost. For me that meant some of his better routines, which i could watch on repeat, like the political correctness one with his Nan, were much worse. My view anyway.

and he was genuinely surprised that his tour was bigger than the last one, he was saying that his audience on the tour had gone up by about 20%, but he didn't think 'Comedy Vehicle' would get a second series. It wasn't the best thing he's ever done and I'd heard alot of the material before, but most importantly, it wasn't Jimmy Carr..

There is also a boring explanation for why it took so long. Lucy Lumsden, who was in charge of the BBC Comedy department, left for Sky in the Summer, and I think she had been Stew's champion. She wasn't replaced by Cheryl Taylor until the autumn, and after that the department began to relocate to Manchester, so it all took time.

Taylor has commissioned Spaced and Black Books in the past though and hopefully she'll make a few more decisions along the same lines.

As I said up above, I don't think his stand up works so well in 30 minute bursts, and to be fair I think in some cases he hamstrung himself a bit by trying to write stuff that would be a little more inclusive for a TV audience. Nor did the sketches work on the whole - in some cases they broke up any flow that the standup was getting.

He was also writing much of the material 18 months before it was broadcast and recording about three months earlier, which is probably why he largely avoided topical stuff - it didn't have the turn around time that something like HIGNFY does.

Despite all those problems though, for me it crapped all over most of last year's TV schedules.